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2/4/16

GERMANY; Germans enjoy highest real-wage rise in decades

Official data for 2015 released by Germany's statistics office, Destatis, on Thursday, showed wages in Europe's largest economy rose 2.5 percent in real or price-adjusted terms last year - the biggest annual increase since 1992, according to a Destatis spokesperson.

In nominal terms, wages increased by 2.8 percent on average, while annual inflation came in at 0.3 percent, the statisticians calculated.

While stagnating economic growth in the decade following the turn of the millennium had led to a number of years with falling real incomes in Germany, they started to significantly grow again after 2008, Destatis data showed. In 2014, real wages in Germany increased by 1.7 percent - the second biggest rise in the past decade.

Destatis said that it was not yet able to quantify the full impact on the index from the national minimum wage introduced at the beginning of 2015. Evidence would suggest, however, that "the pay of employees with below-average wages saw large nominal increases."

Last year, Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government introduced a legal minimum wage of 8.50 euros ($9.40) per hour in efforts to shore up incomes in the country's low-wage sectors.

 Read more; Germans enjoy highest real-wage rise in decades | Business | DW.COM | 04.02.2016

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